In a previous column on data visualizations I explored the formative role institutional machinery—tenure, university centers and institutes, and government grants and fellowships—plays in the production of digital projects. In this column, I consider the processes that sustain those projects. Using the case study of the September 11 Digital Archive, I want to suggest that treating digital projects as finished products presents three problems. First, it promotes an unreasonable estimation of the cost of digital projects; second, it devalues the labor required to maintain resources; and third, it elides the unique risks electronic materials face.

To solicit contributions from ordinary people across the world, curators created both English- and Spanish-language versions of their website, crawled Arabic websites, and collaborated with the Museum of Chinese in America to videotape and translate interviews with Chinatown residents. The result is an archive that is remarkably diverse—including some of the web's earliest blog entries, user-submitted email threads, cellphone images and videos, and Flash animations—and dauntingly messy. As a visitor, it's easy to get lost, and some items are downright unsettling. But that is the nature of social history. Rather than providing a manicured history of the terrorist attacks, the 9/11 Digital Archive captures the ephemera through which individuals processed those events.

Building the 9/11 Digital ArchiveIf one focused exclusively on the launch of the 9/11 Digital Archive, the development costs would appear remarkably inexpensive. The project's $300,000 grant from the Sloan Foundation covered administrative costs for its first several years. However, that tally does not include the "free" labor invested by faculty and staff at CUNY and GMU. Without institutional support, namely tenure and funded graduate students, the team would have needed costly external contractors.

Most public grants include cost-sharing terms. When the team secured a National Park Service grant, the terms required a 1:1 cost-share. For every dollar of the $156,000 GMU received, it had to donate an equal ratio from their staffing. That requirement raises logistical challenges. Of the 40 employees at the Center for History and New Media, only four are paid through the university, according to Sharon Leon, director of public projects. The other 35 are funded through grants, many of which cannot be cost-shared.

Maintaining the 9/11 Digital ArchiveWithout grant funding, the burden falls on academics and their institutions. In the case of the 9/11 Digital Archive, the team was forced to sustain the archive for nearly eight years, from 2003 to 2011, without adequate funding. When I spoke with Stephen Brier from CUNY, a member of the original team, he emphasized the ad hoc solutions with which his team maintained the site. At one point, there was one graduate student assigned for upgrading the metadata of more than 150,000 digital items. The team feared that an anniversary cyberattack might cripple the archive. In 2011, Brier co-authored a piece that itemized sustainability concerns, including the need to redesign the website, update metadata, create an open-source back-end, and identify a more permanent home for the project.

Thanks to the support of a now-defunct National Park Service grant to save America's treasures, the team has achieved many of those goals. It upgraded metadata using Dublin Core, migrated the site to the more stable platform Omeka, and reopened the collection portal. While those upgrades are welcome, their necessity highlights a key difference between traditional and digital projects. Digital projects require frequent—and oftentimes costly—maintenance to remain operable.

Preserving the 9/11 Digital Archive All archives require maintenance, but digital archives also require translation. Born-digital ephemera face unique risks in that a software update or the decline in popularity of hardware to read them can mean their obsolescence. Try watching a Flash video from the 9/11 Digital Archive on an iPhone. Paper deteriorates over decades but with digital projects, the risk is not the integrity but the legibility of the artifact. As file formats fall out of vogue, curators must translate them into new forms and that act of translation requires both keen understanding and ample resources.

Make no mistake, this is no jeremiad against digital projects. I chose the 9/11 Digital Archive as a case study because I believe it presents a model of rigorous social history that would not be possible without the Internet. By the same token, I want that system of record to endure and to improve, and I fear we will not make such essential public investments without a clear-eyed understanding of the invisible costs of digital projects.

About the Author

As a contributing editor, William Fenton specializes in research and education software. In addition to his role at PCMag.com, William is also a Teaching Fellow and Director of the Writing Center at Fordham University Lincoln Center. To learn more about his research interests, visit his homepage or follow him on Academia.edu, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

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